Todd VanDerWerff reviews the new season:
How much you like the fourth season of Arrested Development will depend on just how quickly you can accept that it’s a show that looks a lot like Arrested Development and shares most important elements in common with that show but is also another series entirely, something more like Mitch Hurwitz and the cast of that earlier show got together to make a bunch of loosely intersecting short films about the characters from the earlier project, each with its own tone and point-of-view. It’s an occasionally hilarious, sometimes boring, always bloated boondoggle of a project, and it’s the sort of thing that’s at once staggering in its ambition and hard to approach with anything like real affection. It is, in places, masterful. It is also, in other places, at once weirdly pleased with itself and too ready to hold the audience’s hand where that hand needn’t be held. It’s also very oddly directed and edited, though some of that just might stem from the project’s inability to get the whole cast in one place at one time, due to the actors’ other commitments.
I must confess to only getting around to the first three episodes. David Cross remains priceless. But I found the dialogue often subsumed by the music or mumbled; and the genius of some moments – like Buster inhaling his mother’s cigarette smoke to blow it out of the window – got bogged down in the tedious confusion of others. But if watching the first round of AD compulsively taught me anything, it’s that
the show is terrible until you watch it all. Any critique of the show based on an incomplete viewing is one you should ignore at all costs.
So I’ll withhold judgment until we’re satiated and can get all the jokes. Jace Lacob, meanwhile, pans the season:
Whereas the first three seasons were subtle, there is a decided lack of finesse here. Season 4 feels like an anvil being dropped on the heads of the viewers, one with a note attached that reads, “LOVE ME. PLEASE LOVE ME. LOVE ME,” all in caps. The humor feels broader and more overtly self-conscious. It trades far too easily on callbacks to the early seasons, a sort of unpleasant fan service that is depressing to watch.
Brian Merchant is on the same page:
[T]he new season of Arrested Development is not all that good. It’s just not. It’s still reasonably funny, and more interesting than most things on TV, but the frantic, diabolically plotted comedy of the 00s is MIA. Instead of ensemble madness we get plodding single character-led episodes, some of which—especially the Lindsay episodes—are downright tedious. And no one ever expected to associate Arrested Development with tedium—over-stimulation, maybe, schizophrenia, sure—but not boredom. I was actually bored watching some of these episodes.
The Dish 